The biggest issue is the curvature the booksorber looks promising for that.

I can tell you how I do it.For postprocessing I'm using ScanTailor it's free open source and saves me a lot of hours!.For books (black/white) it's awesome. For magazines/manuals etc I do alittle more work as I touchup the frontpagesand fix some minor things on pages if required.

trying out the demo og booksorber vs scantailor you'll get an idea if it's worth the $30

you actually have the basic setup already.. try taking pictures with your camera -of a book- and try the demo...I'm curious as to what the result is.. I might even try it out today myself when I'm done working on the magazine I'm processing now

Today I've made some sample pictures to use with booksorber, and while it looks promising the application still needs loads of work.

The solution for setting up a camera on a tripod, and using this applications is regarded with mixed feelings:

It's javabased and slow. The boundary detection (edges of the book) isn't working (yet)while you manually need to set the boundary, the pages won't become straight unless you have loads of patience, did I mention it's slow? Moving a node feels like pulling a 100kg ball, ok perhaps only 50kg.Some text in one page became black, while some other became light gray.The automatic finger removal doesn't work. I had to manually fix all the pages (I took 4 pictures) after it's processing job.It takes JPG as input, and throws out JPG and PDF. Tbh I'd prefered the output to be TIF or PNG.While all automatic, it doesn't do white balancing on images, so images are in the hands of the light when taking the picture.

[Some good things]The 2 pages that came out decent were quite goodit generates a PDF when done.It runs on any computer with Java installed

the verdict of booksorber version 1.1.3 - it doesn't live up to it's expectations of what they say on their websiteThe job could be made better and faster using a scanner and image processing software (did I mention it was slow?)

Alright, Java is an absolute no-go for me. Won't install that anymore because of it's constant security isssues and annoying updates.

I looked a bit more into these devices and found out they're called overhead scanners. There are some really cheap ones for A4 size, but the reviews were awful, most say it's basically webcam quality and the lighting isn't constant.